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Products are having shorter lifespans with ever decreasing levels of repairability. Like what others have said here, our expectations have become so low that it

Products are having shorter lifespans with ever decreasing levels of repairability. Like what others have said here, our expectations have become so low that it is commonly expected that the things we buy will only last a year or two before we end up throwing them away. This can be easily resolved if people simply paid more money for better quality products and brands that ensure repairability and longevity. But, of course, as time has shown, cheapness has won over consumer behavior. I'd consider this a market failure. I've always thought that this failure could be corrected by simply increasing the cost of disposal ("throwing things away") via some kind of tax. When my vacuum cleaner, my toaster, or even my coffee maker dies, throwing it away costs very little money. So little money that it is better worth my time to simply dispose it in the trash and buy a new one. But if I find disposing them to be costly, I'll certainly reconsider my options.

xixixao 6y ago
There was a simple system for this with bottles: There is a premium which you pay, that is returned when you correctly dispose of the bottle. Perhaps a similar mechanism could be applied. The “cost” of disposing is then the time to get the money back, not the premium itself.
- labawi 6y ago
  This might work. A big issue with paying for disposal is the motivation to avoid payment. It's hard to get people to dispose of trash responsibly. If they had to pay, we'd be surrounded by illegal dumps. I think there should be disposal fees, but they must be paid upfront. EU actually has recycling fees on purchase, but they seem to be laughably small (like < 1 EUR for a vacuum cleaner).
MzHN 6y ago
How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not? High price does not automatically signal longevity. The other thing is that nothing lasts forever, so eventually you'd need to repair. Most things you can't repair by yourself, so if the repair costs more than new, and the suggested increase for disposal, I'd still end up buying new to save the hassle. My wishlist is: - For consumers, incentivize repair over disposal and buying. - For companies, incentivize manufacturing quality and design for repairability. But the question still stands how to do either?
- foofoo4u 6y ago
  All good questions. I am not going to pretend I know the answers here. I'll share my thoughts though. > How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not? You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    Perhaps this could be more elegantly solved by making companies pay for the cost of disposal. That way, the business will be incentivized to optimize down the cost because otherwise they'll have to bake the cost into the product, which disincentivizes consumers from buying it through higher prices. It also gets rid of the information asymmetry because the company definitely knows and is incentivized to know their overall quality so they can account for it.
musingsole 6y ago
Paying more isn't enough. Consumers can't cover the liability costs that come along with opening an electrical panel channeling a household's mainline. The cost argument imagines 5% more cost for a few features to aid some simple maintenance. The off-the-shelf cost of those features could well be 5% more. But the support logistics, legal coverage, manual drafting, etc won't be covered by that 5%. The idea of repairing a washing machine is great. But our world is growing more complex by the day. The average individual is going to lose any hope of having even enough shallow expertise to crack into these devices without endangering themselves and others. If you pursue this fight, I'd put money in the industries developing "needed" technologies that pack toxic gas in vacuum parts to further increase the expertise needed to touch their internals.

xixixao 6y ago

There was a simple system for this with bottles: There is a premium which you pay, that is returned when you correctly dispose of the bottle. Perhaps a similar mechanism could be applied. The “cost” of disposing is then the time to get the money back, not the premium itself.

labawi 6y ago
This might work. A big issue with paying for disposal is the motivation to avoid payment. It's hard to get people to dispose of trash responsibly. If they had to pay, we'd be surrounded by illegal dumps. I think there should be disposal fees, but they must be paid upfront. EU actually has recycling fees on purchase, but they seem to be laughably small (like < 1 EUR for a vacuum cleaner).

MzHN 6y ago

How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not? High price does not automatically signal longevity. The other thing is that nothing lasts forever, so eventually you'd need to repair. Most things you can't repair by yourself, so if the repair costs more than new, and the suggested increase for disposal, I'd still end up buying new to save the hassle. My wishlist is: - For consumers, incentivize repair over disposal and buying. - For companies, incentivize manufacturing quality and design for repairability. But the question still stands how to do either?

foofoo4u 6y ago
All good questions. I am not going to pretend I know the answers here. I'll share my thoughts though. > How do I as a consumer know if a product will last or not? You, yourself, wont know. Not unless you are an expert on the product, which most people are not. The manufacturer may know what they are selling you is terribly engineered and will break, but you will not. So how can we overcome this imbalance of knowledge? I think the automotive industry is a good example of this being addressed. If I want to buy a car, how do I know that it is going to be reliable? I don't. Even if I were an expert, I don't have the luxury to buy the car, inspect its mechanics, and return it if I don't like it. But yet, even when situated with this predicament, I can still make a well informed decision that will give me a great chance of obtaining a reliable car. Why? It's because there is a plethora of institutions I have access to to evaluate what brand I should go with. The IIHS, NHTSA, Kelly Blue Book, J.D. Power, Edmunds, Motor Trend, Consumer Reports, my local car mechanic, and more. As great as these institutions may be, I believe it only part of the solution. The second is there needs to be a *demand* for reliability. The demand for automotives exists because the price of not having it is costly. Failure can mean major surprise repair bills, a ruined vacation, stranded on the side of the road for hours, etc. Such a price doesn't exist for the failure of my little toaster. But perhaps this can be artificially made with a disposal tax as I suggested in my post.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  Perhaps this could be more elegantly solved by making companies pay for the cost of disposal. That way, the business will be incentivized to optimize down the cost because otherwise they'll have to bake the cost into the product, which disincentivizes consumers from buying it through higher prices. It also gets rid of the information asymmetry because the company definitely knows and is incentivized to know their overall quality so they can account for it.

musingsole 6y ago

Paying more isn't enough. Consumers can't cover the liability costs that come along with opening an electrical panel channeling a household's mainline. The cost argument imagines 5% more cost for a few features to aid some simple maintenance. The off-the-shelf cost of those features could well be 5% more. But the support logistics, legal coverage, manual drafting, etc won't be covered by that 5%. The idea of repairing a washing machine is great. But our world is growing more complex by the day. The average individual is going to lose any hope of having even enough shallow expertise to crack into these devices without endangering themselves and others. If you pursue this fight, I'd put money in the industries developing "needed" technologies that pack toxic gas in vacuum parts to further increase the expertise needed to touch their internals.